Web Comics

Chloroville

By Hervé St-Louis
Oct 28, 2008 - 0:00:05 AM

Writer(s): Victor Wong
Penciller(s): Victor Wong
Inker(s): Victor Wong
Colourist(s): Victor Wong
Letterer(s): Victor Wong

I stumbled upon a new Web comic strip called Chloroville by Toronto artist and Hong Kong-born Victor Wong. In Chloroville, vegetables, plants and fruits live in a city where all their activities are inspired by growing stuff and agriculture. There are lots of second degrees joke and fun puns hidden behind the cutesy characters that one could mistake for a set of children’s cartoon series stars in this Web comics.

Characters, or vegetables, I should say, take on the personalities of the vegetables they represent. For example, Gary, a garlic bunch, stinks and is not very popular with other vegetables. Beatrice is a large and obese cabbage with a bubbly personality. Many readers will be put off by the simplicity of the strip but an element of passive aggression pervades this bunch of vegetables acting like humans.

Visually, Wong favours the thick black line as a contour that segregate the characters and foreground elements from their backgrounds. Interesting for its simplicity of execution and ease of reading this style is still at odd with the theme of this Web comic, a bunch of vegetables acting like humans. One would think that a comic strip with stark differentiation of characters from their settings would be reserved for a series about characters at odd with their environment, as opposed to vegetables living in a pastoral town.

Wong updates Chloroville every Saturdays at http://www.chloroville.com. He began the strip in early January 2008.